Architecture and interior design thread

Cheers, Jonny, very happy to reply on this thread (but let's meet up, anyway--much better to get the boring stuff done here :) ). Also @kboy.

On this 'building' specifically, my attitude is rather like hoefla's:

I'm not anti-high buildings but that "tulip" really is a bad joke. I can't believe it can be approved by planners, nor that any client thinks there is a need/viability. It's awful.

I see it as a bit like a modern version of a TV tower, once an emblem of modernism often with a restaurant high up in there and eating while enjoying the views of the impending space age. I'm not opposed to the idea of a publically-accessible viewing platform above a city in principle. I have very fond childhood memories of going up in the TV tower at Mannheim and running around the rotating platform while the grown-ups had a meal that we children obviously didn't want to sit down for for very long. Also, many people, probably mostly long-sighted people, enjoy long views very much; although I do think that things like the BT Tower, in first breaking above traditional building heights, can act as trailblazers to establish future public acceptability of more tall buildings. However, as hoefla says, this is simply an awful design. Gimmicky, standalone, one of those things that screams 'individualism iconised in the skyline'. Unlike the 'roof garden' on the walkie-talkie, this is designed for public access, although I expect that prices will be very high and hence exclusionary. The planning meeting is this coming Tuesday, when we'll see if the politicians will follow the officers' recommendation. I hope not, or at least that it's called in and nuked by the Mayor of London.

On tall buildings more generally; I am, of course, not against all tall buildings. However, with respect to city centres in general and Central London in particular, I consider them built symbols of injustice. Not only is there a lot of dirty money sloshing around, but even if financed with non-laundered money they represent a comprehensive failure by society to prevent repression (see certain foreign 'governments' investing in London), exploitation, reprehensible business practices, and concentration of power.

Needless to say, even low-rise development can be financed by sources like the above and is by no means always above criticism. However, the concentration of tall buildings in city centres is a massive social problem. Social problems existed well before Livingstone caved in to developer pressure and opened London to Manhattanisation, which to its credit it had long resisted, but they have been amplified partly as a consequence of this. Obviously, to some extent architecture is just a symptom; of excess, of that over-confidence of too-late-post-Thatcherism; but in this case the symptom would undoubtedly have influenced investment behaviour and the cult of property, and lest we forget, a very substantial cause of the financial crash lay in property.

Since the early 00s there has been almost a default that in the UK you can't invest in anything other than property, and the developments in the City, the Shard, around Canary Wharf, or in Vauxhall and Battersea, among others, are the tip of the iceberg of this. I think this is mostly wrong. Not only is there the aforementioned display of what I consider a thoroughly undesirable image of society, but a lot of other problematic consequences.

Take transport policy, which I go on about ad nauseam. You have the bizarre spectacle of public transport-advocating Labour politicians advancing the well-out-of-date Crossrail (because Livingstone had run out of ideas by 2004 and Gordon Brown caved in), whose only significant effect will be a further increase in returns from property in Central London, mostly owned by Conservative Party supporters and foreign investors. This causes endless pressure on the public purse, because more concentrated development in city centres leads to much less mixed use (essential for reducing the need to travel), so that more and more jobs are concentrated in centres, and conversely there are fewer jobs (because of said concentration). If you travel around in London at most times of day outside the peak hours, taking into account Congestion Charge-induced peak spreading, you find that London has immense transport capacity at most times, except when pretty much everybody has to go to the same places. Still, we talk about an underground motorway Ring Road (as per the 'Roads Task Force'); the Mayor of London quite wrongly approves the Silvertown motorway tunnel; Crossrail gets built and Crossrail 2 is in the works while minor and quite important projects get cancelled in the North, etc. All to facilitate travel into Central London and further fill the coffers of the wealthy rentiers owning property there, with profit margins expected at levels that in former times would have been considered morally unacceptable.

Meanwhile, smaller centres are declining; much of this, of course, is additionally caused by the Internet, which has brought about another, even worse, form of concentration, e.g. people buying from Chain Reaction Cycles instead of through their LBS, but the main reason why smaller centres are increasingly unviable is still because they remain underdeveloped and the show moves elsewhere. This is a global trend, not at all limited to London, although here as in other very large cities it is at its most extreme. There are many examples in London; one of the most striking is the decline of Croydon, which is a huge place in its own right, but with the improvement in rail services from there to Central London and the developments in Central London that have taken a lot of businesses away from Croydon, you even get an important cornerstone shop like Allders closing. The situation is worse for many smaller centres. Go around London and look at all the former parades of small, terraced-house-wide shops which used to be necessary when shops needed to be walkable and cheap energy for a vast public transport network and private motor traffic was not so easy to come by.

One of my favourite/least favourite examples (delete as appropriate) is in Teesdale Street, E2. That used to be full of shops and was undoubtedly a lively local centre. Then lots of factors took their toll; quite likely bombing, but then also the much more destructive post-war development of the area. The street was interrupted and carved up; ill-considered buildings that don't address the street were added, transport, as mentioned, changed, and all the viability was sucked out of this small-scale economy as a viable model. However poor living conditions would have been then (I have no interest in romanticising that time--many of these areas were slums or close to slums, injustice was rampant, and the hygiene and comfort brought by modern conveniences is obviously a bit of an improvement), it would be much to our benefit if such smaller centres, which still work in many places, mostly more affluent ones, were full of specialist shops that people could run independently, providing much more employment and localised benefits than any of the larger shops in central locations, or indeed any Internet business, ever can provide.

There is another class of tall building that's somewhat different from the Manhattanisation problem, i.e. your typical residential tower block in low-density locations, a product of the nonsense concocted by that idiot Le Corbusier and some others. These were usually based on the idea that residential and transport functions ought to be separated, or 'la ville radieuse' . Look at most post-war London council estates, which were generally of lower density than what they replaced (although some were built on former industrial land) and included taller buildings for 'more light, more air'. Land in London had become cheap and there were genuine initiatives by councils to improve the lot of the urban poor beyond moving them out to Essex or Hertfordshire. However, as we know now, it is generally preferable to improve existing stock than to opt for wholesale demolition and rebuild, and in the light of this knowledge it is doubly absurd that the latter still goes on, albeit often on sites which in themselves were the subject of post-war wholesale demolition, e.g. the large housing estates in Southwark currently being replaced by buy-to-let estates of higher density. Nonetheless, the main effect the 'thinning out' had was to destroy the viability of many local centres and via a couple of detours to concentrate commercial activity mainly in Central London. Existing connections in the city were severed (estates often had poor permeability by design, based on the erroneous belief that if only you make the network of paths through them twisty, you'll discourage through motor traffic; of course, that didn't work, leading to the gates across many estate streets today), e.g. walking desire lines that used to provide centres with customers were obscured and often caused people to take transport elsewhere, whether by private or public transport. This isn't the fault of tall buildings alone, but of the wider phenomenon of which tall buildings of the above type are a key part--uneven development that doesn't address the public realm, that even deliberately withdraws from it--wealthy gated community or tall tower for poor people, the problem is essentially the same. This kind of development was a key contributing factor to the over-centralisation that we see today. London was always very centralised, but never quite in the extreme way we see today.

So, one consequence of attempts at implementation of 'la ville radieuse' was first the dying of city centres, small and large. In London, this never happened quite so comprehensively as envisaged to thin it out enough to build a latticework of motorways, or ring roads, throughout the city, as to its credit London's population was always opposed to this, but it happened in other places, and of course in London we have things like the Westway or the M11 Link Road. Nonetheless, despite the lack of 'progress' on these plans, the allied policies of 'more light, more air', moving people out to artificially-created satellite towns that turned into commuter belt dormitories and didn't develop their own strong economies, property prices in Central London, even in the City, fell precipitately, paving the way for future developers to play the long game and assemble larger sites from the former patchwork of very small ones, seen most strinkingly in the City, where the tall buildings of today all sit on assembled sites that were once intriguingly diverse. This is the current situation. It is most likely that unless there are major political changes and there is a significant correction to the expectations of profit from property today, that this trend will continue and the 'clusters' of tall buildings will expand.

Anyway, in summary for me the problems with tall buildings are very much connected with wider problems of modernism, land use strategies, etc. Hope that goes some way towards answering your question! I've written other things in the same vein elsewhere on here that go into a little more detail on individual aspects. All of this is not even to mention the security and potential safety problems, as seen at Grenfell Tower, for example.

Obviously, complaining about some of this stuff is a bit like shutting the stable door when the horse has bolted, lived free and wild for ten years, sired seven foals, and finally died, but it's never too late to start turning the supertanker around.